by Amy Faye
Diana saw something coming from the side; from the angle that she had, she knew that it was likely that she was the first one to see it, and she tried desperately to call out to the blue drake that carried her.
The words were lost to the air and the wind, though, the speed too much to hear anything at all, which was why the black dragon, small and flying fast with its wings tucked in tight for a rapid dive, smacked into the side of the blue, and that in turn was the reason that Diana found herself hurtling towards the ground with nothing to stop her but the force of broken hopes and dreams.
16
In the crystal clarity of the moment before she died, the moment usually reserved for seeing your life flash before your eyes, Diana thought how terribly near they were to the base of the mountain she'd called home for most of her embarrassingly brief life. She took another moment, the space of a heartbeat, to hope that there was something waiting for her after death and that Dad would be there for her, maybe to explain what the fuck had just killed her.
The blow didn't come from the direction she'd expected, and it hurt more than she'd expected splattering on the ground to hurt.
Diana had always imagined that falling from an excessive height, hundreds of feet in the air, would feel like nothing at all. She'd fall, her stomach would do several flips like some sort of Cirque du Doleil act inside her guts, and maybe she'd puke. She would scream, but she was screaming already.
Then, when the earth finally hit, it would be an instantaneous absence of life. She'd go from being a person, terrified and seeing the ground grow below her, straight to being jelly that someone had splattered on the ground. It was a thought that most people probably didn't spend a lot of time on. Diana wished that she spent less time thinking about it. It would have probably made her day better, on average, particularly because there was a nice large, plate-glass window that it seemed any little gust of wind might tip the building over for her to fall out of in the office.
But as long as she stayed inside the library, where there were no windows at all, she was okay. That was what kept her working there, in spite of the hellevator that made her think the entire way up that it could drop her in an instant. That was what kept her working there in spite of the number '20' that showed on the display in that infernal contraption when she finally arrived at work.
At least, she had worked in a building like that. She didn't work there any more. As she let her body hurt, let herself scream, she realized that it had been more than a second or two since the hurt had started. Moreover, if she was still falling, her stomach wasn't doing that fucked up flipping it had been doing.
Maybe she had died, after all. Maybe that brief moment of pain, pain that she still felt as a dull ache in her ribs, had been the first thing to hit, and she'd been immediately transported up into heaven. Diana opened her eyes and immediately closed them again when the wind hit them, hard enough to hurt.
An impossibly bright light shone in the middle of an open blue sky, and everything hurt more than it could possibly have hurt if she hadn't died. That was what she thought, anyways. But then she felt something pull tighter around her, and in the darkness that surrounded Diana with her eyes closed, she thought that she could smell something familiar. Something leathery and woody and masculine.
It was a smell that stuck with her, not least because it had clung to her hair and her skin for hours after she'd finished with Alex Blume, and kept her awake and overstimulated and way too fucking aroused after she'd left, all night.
Her eyes opened, hoping that she'd understand something, that she'd been in some kind of strange seizure and now she was starting to come out of it. It explained the pain in her side, for example, better than anything else.
She was held in the air, carried under one arm of a dragon like a rag doll. Her leg dangled awkwardly behind them, even as the rest of her body seemed as if it were perfectly satisfied to stick in close and fit into the slipstream around the giant green beast.
A voice spoke, somewhere directly in her mind. A voice that was quite impossible, first because it was inside her head, and second because it seemed to legitimately expect an answer.
"Are you alright?" It wasn't Alex's voice, not quite. There was more to it. It layered over itself, some parts deep and others shrill, like someone had run the whole thing through an octave chorus synthesizer.
"I'm fine," she said out loud. The words failed to reach her own ears, and she knew that the dragon couldn't possibly have heard her, but it seemed to be satisfied with her response regardless. She didn't bother wondering why that could be; there had already been enough craziness going on that she wasn't going to question it. "Where are we going?"
If she was imagining things, talking to a voice in her head, a voice that she couldn't answer out loud and didn't know how to answer in her head to its apparent satisfaction, then she might as well try to get it to feed her some made-up information, right? There had been enough other crazy things going on that talking to herself seemed like a logical next step.
"If they're attacking here, then there's no place that's really safe," came the answer. It was obvious enough, and yet it was remarkable how, for a voice that didn't seem to be remotely real, it did a surprising amount to disturb her.
"Well fuck," she said, as if that was going to help.
"Well fuck, indeed. We have to find someplace else. Someplace safe."
"Where on Earth could possibly be safe from... whatever is chasing us? How many even are there?"
"Too many," he told her.
If there was ever going to be any proof that it was Alex, then the absolute refusal to tell her anything was going to be it. He was passing with flying colors, so far, as much as she hated it. As much as she normally wouldn't have stood for it. There wasn't much choice, though, and Diana knew it.
"Your father's territory. Where is it?"
"I don't understand the question."
"There's a lot you don't understand. Where did he stay? Where did he feel safe?"
"I don't know," she said. The air seemed to stop pulling at her; it stopped threatening to rip her limbs right out of their sockets, and her voice actually managed to reach her ears this time. At the same time, they were flying dangerously close to the surface of the earth. It was an illusion, she knew, but she would have bet her life that she could reach her hand right out and touch the grass beneath them.
"Well, let's start with where he lived."
"I can't tell you that," she said glumly. "Because I wouldn't even know how to tell someone how to fly there."
A mighty flap of the great beast's wings and they darted straight up. He turned in a slow arc, still flying fast. But it was slow enough that she got a good look at the mountain.
There wasn't going to be any convenient way of identifying it, she thought. First, and foremost, because she'd never seen the forest from above. She'd never even thought about what it might look like from up here. It looked like a helicopter shot in a movie, trees thick and pressed together, even though she knew that their trunks were far enough apart that she could walk with her arms stretched out to both sides and only rarely be able to touch two of them at once.
There was a lot to see, as well. Too much. On the ground, a thousand square miles of mountain was a lot, but she'd covered a surprising amount of it in twenty years of active living, up til she moved out and started to seriously attend university.
Hundreds, maybe. But from up here, it all looked completely different. In fact, it all looked almost completely unfamiliar, even as she knew in her head that this was most certainly the right mountain.
He ducked hard to the side and narrowly avoided the black, and then she was locked into a vomit-inducing whirl. She emptied her stomach into the open air, but there wasn't much left but acid that burned her throat.
Something vaguely stood out. She looked over and saw it again as they rolled, as her face turned a shade of green repeated in the color of the trees beneath them. It was a false peak, perhaps halfway
down the mountain. But she knew where it was, and she knew more than that, that it was only a few miles higher up the mountain than the cabin.
She tried to point but her arm was stuck; she tried to yell out 'there,' instead, though the whole idea seemed a little bit silly when there was no way to indicate where exactly 'there' was.
But in the instant that she recognized the plot of land he was already moving, ducking and lowering towards it. The blue flew up alongside, outpacing Diana and the green dragon bearing her. The green let out a sing-song roar and ducked lower still, spreading out his wings in a sudden effort to slow the approach.
And, to Diana's surprise, as she twisted and squirmed and hoped desperately to see something, she saw nothing. Nothing and nobody had followed. They slowed, they stopped, and set down. Diana looked around and hoped to get a bearing, and felt something in her heart break as she remembered those days.
They were gone now, and they weren't going to come back, because Dad, like it or not, was gone.
17
With the state of her father's body, Diana Kramer had been afraid of what she'd find in the house where they had found it. The cabin wasn't exactly subjected to a cleaning service, after all.
He'd been found with most of his face torn clear away from his body, and his nails ripped back in what anyone would have identified as defensive wounds. Defending against what? Against who? There should have been similar wounds on his attacker, but what if there weren't? What if, for example, his attacker wasn't human at all, and his skin wasn't skin, but hard scales?
Would the wounds even show up in that case? Or would they be like trying to scratch a concrete pillar, leaving nothing behind but the vain, bloody marks to be washed off later like nothing had ever been there?
Diana watched Alex as he walked ahead a little ways. She didn't want to go inside first, and truth be told, wasn't sure she wanted to go inside at all. But more than that, she didn't want either of the who self-proclaimed 'dragons' to be anywhere behind her. They could have been crazy, and hell, she could have been crazy right along with them, but crazy people can still do a hell of a lot of damage if they decide to turn on you. If they're scaly dragons that weigh a thousand pounds, then they're all that much more dangerous.
Diana waited for the reaction to come from one of them. Waited for the screams and the warnings not to come inside. But those warnings never came. A minute later she stepped inside. It was as if he'd never left the place. As if he were just going to come back any minute now, and there would be nothing to worry about any more except for the expense of the funeral that she'd paid for, a funeral where they buried a photo of a living man.
But he wasn't going to come back through the door, she knew. There was no point in getting her hopes up about it when there was nothing to hope for. She had to get over it, get over herself, and recognize that she wasn't going to see Dad again.
It was a tough pill to swallow, after all that time. After spending her entire life with him, only vague half-remembered times with her mother. Only a few years, now, with anyone outside of the cottage and outside of internet chat rooms that she wasn't allowed to be in at all, but more than that, couldn't be on for more than an hour at a time. Dad was smart, in a lot of ways, but when it came to technology he wasn't a brilliant hand.
Diana looked behind her at the sound of a noise, ready to be surprised. Alex strode in with a frown. It was more of a grimace, really, his face fixed in concentration and uncertainty. "This is it?" he said, finally.
"Why, what's wrong with this place?"
"Nothing," he said quickly, as if he only just realized that he might have caused offense with the question. He fit a smile onto his expression that changed nothing but the shape of his mouth, but it only lasted long enough to tell her, as an afterthought, "looks nice; cozy."
Diana dropped into the comfortable chair. She knew that Dad liked this chair, but he never sat in it. Not since she'd claimed it as 'hers.' She wondered if he had started again, after she left. The chair felt well-worn, sat-in, but of course it did. It was her favorite chair, too, and she'd been sitting in it whenever she needed to sit down, for almost twenty years of living in this cabin. So it had a lot of sitting done in it.
There was something else, too. A smell. It smelled like gun oil and tobacco and wood, and that was the smell that Dad had always had wrapped around him. The turpentine did stick to his clothes a little bit, when he wore them to work which he rarely did. In the studio, upstairs, there would be a half-dozen or so outfits he would wear when he worked, and the room would stink to high heaven with near-industrial-strength solvents. But the rest of the house was his domain, for things he enjoyed. Not painting.
"No paintings on the walls," Alex commented from beside her.
"No, there aren't."
"Interesting, that. Interesting."
If he wanted her to respond, he didn't seem to be waiting on it with baited breath. Just adding something that he'd noticed, something that he thought, and he seemed to think that it was going to point something out to her. It didn't.
Dad hated paintings. Hated all of them, but hated his own most of all. 'Practical skill' was as good as he'd talk about it. There was no reason that he would want to have any of those paintings on his walls. The wolf's head over the door, that was him. The cabinet that looked full of fine china, it pulled out and revealed a chest of guns and a heavy, wicked-looking tomahawk. Those were him.
The studio upstairs, that was hardly anything to him. A practical necessity in spite of his distaste for it.
"If you want to see a painting so badly, I can take you to the studio," she said into the room, to nobody in particular. It was just that Alex was the only one there to hear, at that moment. The woman had gone off somewhere, probably looking for something. Probably looking for this mysterious horde.
"Oh? You don't mind?"
"This way," she said, forcing herself out of the chair and leaving a little bit of herself behind in the seat.
The stairs were as sturdy as they'd ever been. When she heard, years later, that he'd built the place himself, Diana had suddenly taken on a new appreciation for the little cabin. It was small, to be sure, but it was well-built. And it must have taken quite some time, quite a bit of effort. She'd also begun to suspect that eventually, in a time not too far gone, it would become rickety.
After all, Dad wasn't a house builder. He was a painter, sometimes a hunter, sometimes a lot of things. But a timber framer, he wasn't. And yet, it was as sturdy as anything she'd experienced, even after all this time. It might be another two hundred years before the place started to feel decrepit, and that was if nobody kept up repairs.
The first room on the right, upstairs, was hers. His was the first on the left. Right across from one another. There was a bathroom beside her room, on the right side. Across from it, another door. It was a closet, just big enough to walk in and close the door behind you. It had a light in case you thought that it was a good idea, but nobody ever did, and now nobody ever would. Still, it made it easier to find things in the dark, as well.
Past that, the entire thing dead-ended in a door, as well. The door was sealed, with little caulking strips at the top, bottom, and sides, to keep the air from flowing from that room into the rest of the house, which was a fact for which Diana was eternally grateful. Art was a beautiful thing, and it was important. A great deal of people would pay a great deal of money to see the inside of an artist's workshop.
Yet, there was a smell attached to it, too, and it wasn't a smell that she wanted to have filling the house late at night, when Dad suddenly decided that 3 in the morning was the time for painting again.
The studio door was locked. It was one of the three locks in the entire building, and the other two were heavy dead-bolts on the front and back door. Dead-bolts that had apparently been left open, at least in the front, because Alex hadn't even realized that it was there.
She pulled back away and reached for the keys in her pockets, found the ri
ng and counted off keys. It was a pure indulgence that she carried it; she couldn't have told Alex if he'd asked how many times she said that she was going to take the studio key off her key ring.
She didn't need it, after all. She'd never needed it, not once, not until today. But now she was glad that she had it, because the only alternative was to scrape the whole house from top to bottom, hoping that there was a spare hidden somewhere. A spare that she strongly suspected wasn't there.
If they couldn't get in with a key, then it would have turned to the next easiest alternative, which was tearing the door right off its hinges, and it would never be set right again. Nobody would bother. After all, who was going to live here?
Diana had a life in the city. She had classes to get back to at some point, if she didn't get eaten before then. She had things to worry herself over. Living in a cabin on the mountain, like a hermit, like her Dad had, wasn't an option for her even if she wanted it, and it wasn't what she wanted.
The bolt made a satisfying clunk when she finally did get it open, and then she turned the handle, breathed in the familiar scent of noxious fumes, and stepped inside.
18
With the state of her father's body, Diana Kramer had been afraid of what she'd find in the house where they had found it. The cabin wasn't exactly subjected to a cleaning service, after all.
He'd been found with most of his face torn clear away from his body, and his nails ripped back in what anyone would have identified as defensive wounds. Defending against what? Against who? There should have been similar wounds on his attacker, but what if there weren't? What if, for example, his attacker wasn't human at all, and his skin wasn't skin, but hard scales?
Would the wounds even show up in that case? Or would they be like trying to scratch a concrete pillar, leaving nothing behind but the vain, bloody marks to be washed off later like nothing had ever been there?
